Strange Happenings

Previously on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones.

I think the funnest one is the fact that they were missing a nuclear warhead.

I like that one.

Well, they're quiet, but they had definite two spotlights coming out of the bottom of them. It was just going over the lake. The geese were just going crazy. To me, it seemed like they were looking for something.

She was a lot more concerned. You'll, for in case they're trying to find people and find kids to nab, like sex traffickers are gone extremely high tech. I'm canning at least one two, three, four five.

That actually rotated, looking as if it was appearing in each window of our home.

Hello, where are you? I'm out by the county line and walking around looking at a few of these abandoned barns.

You need to be really careful out there.

You know what I told you when I talked to my students in Benckelmann.

Especially the boys. They said those places can be inhabited by.

People that are making mess all sorts of stuff, so you really need to be aware of your surroundings.

Well, I'm going to go down by the river and.

So can you text me?

Though, even if you can't call me please, I.

Need to know where you are.

Stories are like puzzles. Nothing makes sense until most of the pieces are in place, when you really start to see the big picture. With the unknown aircraft, I was hoping to quickly find which pieces were missing while trying to verify that the FBI had given the order to shoot these objects down. I dialed in on what I knew. I'd learned this forms of these mysterious aircraft varied in size, and we're being seen nightly over many counties. Most sightings started at dusk and ended around ten pm.

It just makes me really uneasy because I feel like somebody is watching us all the time. That's just super unnerving.

I'd been able to chat with a few residents and at this point people were wanting more information from local authorities. The following excerpt is from you MC County Sheriff Todd Combe's Facebook post and was read by a voice actor.

I will tell you right up front, I do not have a lot of answers for you at this time. I wish I did, but I don't. I think we're all feeling a little bit vulnerable due to the intrusion of our privacy that we enjoy in our real community. But I don't have a solution or no of one right now. All I can say is, don't live your life in the fear of the unknown. I will keep you informed as soon as I hear anything.

Chapter three. Above the prairie, the big white one is hovering low to the ground. If I had to guess, I don't know. Two to three hundred feet in the air. There are these red and green flashes moving around it to the switch was flipped. On my vacation, that calm feeling you get from being at home turned into pure adrenaline. With each hour, I found myself getting sucked into this odd series of events that seemed more like a sci fi movie than real life. I wasn't sure what my next steps should be, or if I should even be the one looking for next steps, as I'd soon be traveling back to Los Angeles. I started googling, searching through a ton of information about airplanes in UFO sidings. I wanted to know if anything similar to these craft had been seen in the area before.

What were your grandparents' names, and what were they like.

The man's name was Milt Clayton Moreland. Clara Moreland was his wife. I do have a picture of him sitting on the eve of a house with a team of horses moving a house across the prairie. So he was a can do it man.

I discovered an old article about unexplained flying objects published in a local newspaper from nineteen fifty. Apparently the report was given by Milton Clara Morland of Imperial, Nebraska. They passed away, but I was able to talk with their grandson, Terry McNair about their story. What do you remember them telling you about what they experienced that day in nineteen fifty.

Well, I remember mostly my grandmother talking about it, and she would get quite excited, and she would say that these things just came buzzing along and they weren't large, they were small, you know, like saucer basketball shaped, and you know, they were just kind of flittering along all together, a whole bunch of them, and they came in from one way and swooped out a different way.

So she's just, you know, sitting at home one day, it's it's daylight, and these saucer type basketball looking objects just kind of appear.

They just kind of appear. They heard noise, and they went out to investigate it. That's what they found.

If Terry hadn't used the word saucer, his description sounded eerily similar to the drone behavior I'd heard about.

He is of you know what, you think they saw.

Flying saucers. I thought that my whole life.

Had you heard any other stories of flying saucers in that area before?

Not?

Really. I would remember my mother talking about lights in the prairie when she was a kid, that they would see lights in different areas where they're knew there was no population. They were just lights.

What do you mean by by lights?

They were more along the land rather than high in the sky. They were they were close to the earth, but off in the distance. She just said that they were unexplained.

So she just saw weird, weird lights in the prairie.

Mm hmm.

As I looked further into the history of the area, I came across more interesting facts. In the nineteen sixties, a number of locals saw weird objects in the sky. One of those people was Barb Stanley.

I was ten years old and I looked out on the horizon. There was a hilp and as I was sitting there, I saw some type of craft that I think had landed. Then it slowly rose and I thought it was going to just keep going higher, but it just disappeared. Just one minute was there and one minute it wasn't. It was bigger than a car, but didn't look like a car. You know. Back in my ten year old mind, I was just like, wow, you know, I've never never seen anything like that before, not what the Jetsons were like. Yeah, it seemed to be the real deal.

Barb experienced this siding on the family farm, which oddly enough, was close to where these so called drones were first spotted.

A week later, there was a newspaper article that said there was a lady in Imperial that had basically seen the same thing. I took it out to my husbands to read this, so that was kind of an affirmation that I wasn't just making up the story.

You said you were sitting on the porch looking out. You know what's going through your mind when you see this?

I'd say astonishment, because I had the feeling that I was alone, you know, like my parents were gone, and so who would help me. I thought, oh, wow, this is thereous and they mean harm. I'm basically by myself.

That had to be such a surreal feeling, especially at a young age without anyone around. When I continued looking into these sightings, I came across an article about one of the first UFO crashes in modern history. It was said to have taken place in southwest Nebraska near Binkleman in the late eighteen hundreds. As the story goes, in early June of eighteen eighty four, a rare phenomenon occurred.

A few cowboys were out at a round up when they were startled by a loud noise and saw what looked like a blazing body fall into the earth. The next day, a brand inspector found machinery scattered throughout the pasture after the object was cooled, including a wheel fragment with a mill rimp. The object was reported to be fifty to sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or twelve feet in diameter.

Because that story was from so long ago, I took it with a grain of salt. I obviously had no way to check the facts with the locals who'd experienced it. Whether people were seeing drones, flying saucers, or something else. I began to notice a common theme. Most of these sightings occurred near isolated farmhouses outside the city limits. I wasn't sure how this info could plain into what was happening, but it proved one thing unexplained. Aircraft weren't out of the ordinary for this part of the country. Chapter four surrounded it's more residents saw drone like objects flying. I began contacting police stations in neighboring counties. Despite my persistence, it was tough to get anyone to speak with me. There was one person I knew I could lean on outside of law enforcement. His name is Bill Bowerley, and he's a family friend. Bill also just happens to be an aviation expert. He was an Air Force pilot, Delta Airlines pilot, and former member of the local airport authority.

How are you good?

I'm actually working on another aviation product.

Bill's an outdoorsman. When I walked into his house, there were fish and animal heads up on the walls. So have you been good?

This has been my busiest year flying.

After we caught up, Bill dove into his background.

I started got my license in seventy six on a program that was the pre military. It was part of my scholarship. I had to go to the military. Takes a year to get through Air Force pilot training. Seventy eight I graduated. They plowed me back as an instructor because I did too well in the course, and then in Germany for three years, and then from that I went to a test squadron and flew in the test squadron. Left the military on a Friday, started on Monday with Delta, and I've been flying for Delta every month since.

It was Bill's military history that I thought might shine some light on what was going on. So they've been doing drones in the military for a really long time.

Really, that first Golf War was where they really brought him in, so you didn't have to risk a man's life and you could provide reconnaissance. And that's where it got started. In the intel gathering and the censors they can put on it. The miniaturization of all of that just kept improving improvement, so they'd make him smaller and smaller. Well, they kept making him a little bit bigger and giving them more range. So that's where they came up with these twenty four or thirty six hour drones and could just loiter.

I'd heard the term drone tossed around a lot. I pulled up an official definition. A drone is technically any unmanned aircraft that can fly remotely or autonomously. In my opinion, that description left a lot of room for interpretation. Was the word drone just the new and more casual term for UFO. I'd now seen these drones as people were calling them. Three nights in a row, there were larger or black objects illuminating the fields and smaller ones surrounding them. Each night. They were flying in groups.

We were testing the ability to be able to tie remotely piloted vehicles to a mothership, and that was in the late eighties, so we know that you can have a mothership fly and tether wirelessly other ones off of it.

Bill then gave me more than I bargained for a first person report on what he thought maybe flying in the sky.

These are most likely the ones that they'll put a gas engine on them with a small field cell, and that engine then powers electric that powers all the props. We've got military drones that can stay up thirty six hours if you just use the premise that they are a six hour drone, and they can travel at sixty miles an hour. It would be very conceivable, but that you could launch the use from one hundred miles away, go do your work, and then fly that hundred miles home.

Imagine a six foot vehicle with wings, which job takes thirty six hours and covers hundreds of miles.

Somebody's making money doing this. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.

That's what I keep saying.

I follow the money trail.

Follow the money trail. That's the first step. It comes down to what confidence.

Do you have.

In believing what your government tells you want.

By the time I left Bill's, I'd received a few messages. Apparently when people hear you're back home from la and asking questions about a weird phenomenon they've seen too, you get a lot of tips for who to visit with the.

Girl you were talking about. That's your daughter in law, or that's your daughter, or that's my daughter. It is your daughter, Okay. When she was an inner car and those three drones kind of appeared, you know, surrounding her car, how close would she estimate that those were to her actual vehicle as it was going down the road.

She said, they were just like a little above like the telephone polls, So, I mean, she could see them clearly, and there was like three of them and they were just just kind of following her.

A lady named Trisha Michael told me that she'd received a strange phone call late one evening when a few of the unknown aircraft flew above her daughter's vehicle.

She called.

It was her phone number, but it said Palestinian territories as far as our area.

But she I didn't answer it. So when I called her.

Back, she did not answer.

So I called the Palestinian number back just to kind of see what it was and see if I would get anybody or not. And I had just got a male voice recording saying that the number was no longer available. Once she got home and there was nothing above her, and it rang in just fine, it rang in normal.

So when she called you, it said Palestinian territories on your caller ID, where you'd normally see her name.

Correct, Yeah, normally it would say like local, like if it's a local call, it would say Sterling, Colorado, where it would say where it's from.

It had listed Palestinian territories.

What did your daughter describe, you know, feeling like when those drones were following her.

I don't think that that one bothered her nearly as much. Later in that evening, she had gotten home and she was the only one here, and there were three that were parked on our road, and they parked there for about thirty minutes or so at least.

When you say parked, you mean that they were hovering in the air, yeah.

Covering, Yeah, Yeah, they just don't move. So that made her a lot more uncomfortable than just driving underneath it.

Could these aircraft be interfering with cell towers? It sure seemed like that was a possibility. I kept searching for new leads. Let's just say things got even more peculiar.

I just don't get, like, why they're so interested suddenly in this area.

He said that we have the military drums out here that are using scramblers that are trying to break up the signals.

There is a river bottom down through here, and they seem to work the waterway.

The drums that are here have been described as black. We have been told that the military drones are actually light.

Their grid pattern was definitely around Frenchman Creek.

God.

I love sweet and Cream. I used to go here growing up, and I'd always get the same order two hamburgers, ketch boneley, French fry, and uh doctor pepper. It was early evening and I just ordered dinner and to drive through an Imperial when I received information about another encounter. This one seemed different. The lady mentioned in the message didn't live too far east of town. I quickly finished up my meal and headed in her direction. I think this is the turn and to go see this girl right now named Marcy Kelly. There was a pen close by with a few of Marcy's animals. Her goat named Nanny, kept wanting to get in on the interview. Nanny, don't eat my clothes. You are a good goat, though I could tell that Marcy was a small town gall at heart. Before we began our conversation, she walked me through her house, past some family photos, and onto the back patio.

I don't remember where a question was.

No, I was just going to say, you know, is it typical for farmers to use drums?

Yes, even through my husband's work, they have a drone that they check the pivots with, and I think that a lot of other people do too. I think that Southwest Power uses them, probably check the power lines. From what I've understood and now and they're not nearly this.

Bigh What do you make of this whole thing?

Do you?

How do you feel?

I feel uneasy about it, just because there's so many and they've been here for so long, and we don't have an answer of who's doing it. We both, my husband and I both think that they shut off their lights and they can fly lower than and they're undetected, like later at night when they're trying to go back to their check in point or whatever they're trying to do, because then you can hear them, and there's no planes in the area, and it's just a different kind of a noise.

What would lead you to believe that they that they shot off their lights.

Because when they're high up, you can't hear them, and so it's just a different kind of a noise that we hear. So I just it's just kind of a noise that you're like, oh, they're lower and you can hear them, you know, kind of like after a jet goes by and then you hear it later on or something like that.

Marcy had seen most of the aircraft near her property, and she noticed something else. Wild animals weren't acting as they normally would during the winter Sunday.

And it was like the day after the blizzard, like we lost power and stuff Saturday from the snow. My dog's caught a snake, and then a few days before that, my friend's daughter had gotten a turtle, and I'd seen a frog hopping and I'm like, what, So that was weird to me that all of those things are coming out of the ground.

Kind of worried that way. From your perspective, what do the formations look like? And are there different sizes of the drones from what you've seen, I think that.

There's different sizes. I think that there's like a docking station, one that's a little bit bigger that either they get energy from it or charge or reboot or exchange information too. And that one seems pretty just like it hovers. It doesn't really move a lot, kind of just stay stable. And then the other ones. I've seen them go fast, I've seen them go slow. I've seen them shut off the lights and then turn them back on later. And I think that they range in sizes. I don't think that they'd be over ten foot at the biggest. I mean probably mostly five to eight foot.

Could you make out that it was, in fact a drone?

Sounds better than a UFO identified flying object.

Basically, yeah, Just.

When I thought I'd heard every theory, Marcy dropped this one.

I have heard and I haven't seen. I seen a picture of like a green substance that's been dropped, you know. I'm like, oh, what if it's something like dangerous?

When I got back inside the pickup, I played that audio over and over, and.

I seen a picture of like a green substance that's been dropped, A green substance that's been dropped.

Marcy didn't reveal who showed her the picture or where they lived. The skeptic and me kept thinking aircraft dropping things from the sky at night? Why do these accounts keep getting even more bizarre? Just when I begin to wrap my mind around certain parts of this story, I was told another credible, if unbelievable detail coming up on obscure invasion of the drones.

Really, we have to absolutely verify what is happening in Colorado.

Someone has very sophisticated ways to override the FA rules that are in here.

I can see it going off ten of our shop as soon as I opened the garage door, there was a white like infrared camera light.

We want to hear from you. If you have any information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast or other obscure stories in rural America we should look into. Please visit our website at obscurumseries.com and send us an email. To connect with us on social media, you can follow @obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms. OBSCURUM is produced by Imagine Entertainment and Lenners Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is written, hosted, and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki Etour in Me. Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design by Labyrinth Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Semikopenko. This project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks to Dan Bodanski, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield, David Wasserman, Katrina Norvel and my family. OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Follow now